Jake Heggie’s opera Moby-Dick, which has its San Francisco Opera premiere this month, has been an audience and critical favorite wherever it has played since its 2010 world premiere. BARRY SINGER explores the secrets of its success.

Isabel Leonard has moved from success to success in a professional career that began just over six years ago. This season, she has a trio of choice assignments at the Metropolitan Opera — Rosina in a new English-language translation of The Barber of Seville, Blanche de la Force in Dialogues des Carmélites and Miranda in Thomas Adès’s The Tempest. F. PAUL DRISCOLL reports.

This month, composer Thomas Adès will conduct the Metropolitan Opera premiere of The Tempest, his rich, exuberant adaptation of Shakespeare’s fantasy. WILLIAM R. BRAUN reveals the myriad delights of Adès’s score.

In 1956, columnist and professional hostess Elsa Maxwell — then one of café society’s most important opinion-makers — fell under the spell of Maria Callas. An excerpt from a new biography of Maxwell by SAM STAGGS traces the brief trajectory of the unlikely friendship between two twentieth-century legends.

NORTH AMERICA: The Glimmerglass Festival offers The Music Man, Lost in the Stars, Aida and Lully’s Armide; Central City season gathers The Turn of the Screw, Oklahoma! and La Bohème; Princeton hears Rachmaninoff’s Francesca da Rimini, Gianni Schicchi and Il Trovatore; Carmen at Castleton; Cincinnati Opera’s La Traviata; Des Moines Metro Opera presents Don Giovanni, Eugene Onegin and La Rondine. INTERNATIONAL: Glyndebourne’s new Le Nozze di Figaro; the season’s offerings at Aix-en-Provence include Le Nozze di Figaro, David et Jonathas and the world premiere of George Benjamin’s Written on Skin.